A Last Look - Yes, Last For Life - To The Beach,
The Hills, The Low Point, The Distant Town, As We Round Point
Loma And The First Beams Of The Light-House Strike Out Towards
The Setting Sun.
Wednesday, August 24th.
At anchor at San Pedro by daylight.
But instead of being roused out of the forecastle to row the
long-boat ashore and bring off a load of hides before breakfast,
we were served with breakfast in the cabin, and again took our
drive with the wild horses to the Pueblo and spent the day;
seeing nearly the same persons as before, and again getting back
by dark. We steamed again for Santa Barbara, where we only lay
an hour, and passed through its canal and round Point Conception,
stopping at San Luis Obispo to land my friend, as I may truly call
him after this long passage together, Captain Wilson, whose most
earnest invitation to stop here and visit him at his rancho I was
obliged to decline.
Friday evening, 26th August, we entered the Golden Gate, passed the
light-houses and forts, and clipper ships at anchor, and came to our
dock, with this great city, on its high hills and rising surfaces,
brilliant before us, and full of eager life.
Making San Francisco my head-quarters, I paid visits to various
parts of the State, - down the Bay to Santa Clara, with its live
oaks and sycamores, and its Jesuit College for boys; and San
José, where is the best girls' school in the State, kept by the
Sisters of Notre Dame, - a town now famous for a year's session of
"The legislature of a thousand drinks," - and thence to the rich
Almaden quicksilver mines, returning on the Contra Costa side
through the rich agricultural country, with its ranchos and the
vast grants of the Castro and Soto families, where farming and
fruit-raising are done on so large a scale. Another excursion
was up the San Joaquin to Stockton, a town of some ten thousand
inhabitants, a hundred miles from San Francisco, and crossing the
Tuolumne and Stanislaus and Merced, by the little Spanish town
of Hornitos, and Snelling's Tavern, at the ford of the Merced,
where so many fatal fights are had. Thence I went to Mariposa
County, and Colonel Fremont's mines, and made an interesting
visit to "the Colonel," as he is called all over the country,
and Mrs. Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons
of Paris and the drawing-rooms of New York and Washington, or the
roughest life of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa, - with
their fine family of spirited, clever children. After a rest there,
we went on to Clark's Camp and the Big Trees, where I measured one
tree ninety-seven feet in circumference without its bark, and the
bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode through another which
lay on the ground, a shell, with all the insides out - rode through
it mounted, and sitting at full height in the saddle; then to the
wonderful Yo Semite Valley, - itself a stupendous miracle of nature,
with its Dome, its Capitan, its walls of three thousand feet of
perpendicular height, - but a valley of streams, of waterfalls from
the torrent to the mere shimmer of a bridal veil, only enough to
reflect a rainbow, with their plunges of twenty-five hundred feet,
or their smaller falls of eight hundred, with nothing at the base
but thick mists, which form and trickle, and then run and at last
plunge into the blue Merced that flows through the centre of the
valley. Back by the Coulterville trail, the peaks of Sierra Nevada
in sight, across the North Fork of the Merced, by Gentry's Gulch,
over hills and through cañons, to Fremont's again, and thence to
Stockton and San Francisco - all this at the end of August, when
there has been no rain for four months, and the air is dear and
very hot, and the ground perfectly dry; windmills, to raise water for
artificial irrigation of small patches, seen all over the landscape,
while we travel through square miles of hot dust, where they tell
us, and truly that in winter and early spring we should be up to
our knees in flowers; a country, too, where surface gold-digging
is so common and unnoticed that the large, six-horse stage-coach,
in which I travelled from Stockton to Hornitos, turned off in the
high road for a Chinaman, who, with his pan and washer, was working
up a hole which an American had abandoned, but where the minute
and patient industry of the Chinaman averaged a few dollars a day.
These visits were so full of interest, with grandeurs and humors
of all sorts, that I am strongly tempted to describe them. But I
remember that I am not to write a journal of a visit over the new
California, but to sketch briefly the contrasts with the old spots
of 1835-6, and I forbear.
How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this
marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board
shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847,
a population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a
town government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking
together of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden
birth of a city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire
five times in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions
of dollars, and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city
of brick and stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants,
with all the accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now
(in 1859) the most quiet and well-governed city of its size
in the United States. But it has been through its season of
Heaven-defying crime, violence, and blood, from which it was
rescued and handed back to soberness, morality, and good government,
by that peculiar invention of Anglo-Saxon Republican America,
the solemn, awe-inspiring Vigilance Committee of the most grave
and responsible citizens, the last resort of the thinking and the
good, taken to only when vice, fraud, and ruffianism have intrenched
themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage, and ballot, and there
is no hope but in organized force, whose action must be instant and
thorough, or its state will be worse than before.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 161 of 167
Words from 163924 to 165003
of 170236
